People keep looking for the "one underrated skill" as if startups had a secret cheat code. In reality, success comes from balancing messy tradeoffs and learning fast under uncertainty.
The real underrated skill is realizing there isn't one.
Are you based in the US? I've heard that compute capacity peaks during US working hours, and access may be degraded during that time, for example, through dynamic quantization [1].
METR measures tasks, not projects. No project I've worked on had individual tasks that were supposed to take longer than 2 weeks, the PM* broke them down to sub-tasks if they were any bigger.
* At least, where we had a PM. The places I was self-directed could arguably provide an interesting comparison.
Self-managed Talos K8s, self-managed CloudNativePG, and the operational overhead of networking, DNS, etc. All of these were used to be fully managed by AWS for them; zero operational cost.
I'd guesstimate a 2× increase in their operational complexity. So, if they previously required 0.5 DevOps of a full-timer, they'll now need one more DevOps full-timer just to handle the added complexity.
reply